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From Green Beans to a Cup of Joe

After selecting specific varieties of green coffee beans from places like Panama, Guatemala, and Kenya, Tim Curry carefully tests each one to determine just how long to roast them. “The coffee tells me when it’s ready,” he said, explaining that the color and smell indicate when they’re done with heat and need to be poured into the large mesh platform and spun until cool. Photo by Jeremy Jensen/Moonshine Ink

A rare look at coffee beans before they're roasted. The heat applied to the raaw beans causes them to expand in size, in addition to turning that familiar coffee brown. Photo by Jeremy Jensen/Moonshine Ink

Tim Curry searched for over a year before he found the red wood-fire roaster he works with. The machine is a Balestra roaster from Naples, Italy, and Curry found a 2-year-old demo model that requires little maintenance and burns through approximately two cords of wood annually. Photo by Jeremy Jensen/Moonshine Ink

Roasting coffee with fire is a historic tradition, from people roasting over their hearths to Curry’s tried-and-true methods and materials. “The whole point of the oak I use is that it burns well and provides consistent heat,” Curry said. “It doesn’t add smokiness to the coffee; that’s not the objective with this roasting method. I like the way the wood reacts; it’s a different heat dynamic.” Photo by Jeremy Jensen/Moonshine Ink

Green beans are poured into the silver funnel and spun in an internal metal drum before dropping into the circular cooling rack. Just as important as even, specific heating is the airflow throughout the process, and Taylor installed the air ducts to achieve adequate circulation. Photo by Jeremy Jensen/Moonshine Ink

Dark Horse specializes in pour-over coffee, which uses a fine grind and paper filter, requiring careful timing to evenly saturate the grinds and extract the coffee. “Pour-over is one of the freshest cups of coffee you can get, it makes a cleaner cup of coffee,” Taylor said. “It allows for nice caramelization, and for delicate coffees to taste brighter.” Photo by Jeremy Jensen/Moonshine Ink

Dark Horse sources its coffee from Bodhi Coffee Traders, a direct trade organization that promotes better pay and personal relationships with farmers. “The quality of your coffee is only as good as the green beans you buy,” Taylor said. “For me, coffee is all about relationships; it brings people together.” Photo by Jeremy Jensen/Moonshine Ink

Phrases like “the best part of waking up,” cappuccino, coffee break, and “let’s meet for coffee” have become commonplace, and it’s all thanks to one plant: the coffee flower. Coffee plays a significant role in cultures across the globe, from providing a jumpstart to the day to an opportunity to gather with friends and shoot the breeze, coffee in hand. Wanting to know more about the process of making coffee, we turned to two local roasters — one of which recently opened its Truckee coffee shop with in-house roasting — to learn more about the perks of their processes.

Wood-Fire Roasted Coffee Company

There’s only a small number of coffee roasters that use wood to fire the beans, and one of them operates in Reno. Tim Curry has been roasting coffee for 12 years and currently roasts between 450 and 500 pounds a week by burning oak. He produces approximately 12 different coffees with proprietary blends for certain cafés, and he works with five different importers to find unique beans. His Monsooned Malabar variety is stored in open-walled warehouses in monsoon season in India, mimicking the coffee’s historic travels from India to England during that time of year, plus it changes the acidity of the coffee.

Curry’s first coffee-roasting experience was throwing green coffee beans into a saucepan and surprising himself with a great cup of coffee (admittedly beginner’s luck, he said). He’s learned about the intensely time-sensitive process the beans go through, and that you have to listen for subtle sounds like the first crack, which signifies the internal temperature when the beans expand and their pores open, oils develop, and sugars caramelize. A huge, loud timer on the wall rules his roasting hours.

“I never thought of myself as an artistic type,” he said. “I started expressing myself in the coffee, and every blend I created, each coffee tells me when it’s ready, but it’s according to my perception.”

Info: woodfiredroasted.com

Dark Horse Coffee Roasters

If you time it right, you can observe the complete process, from roasting to brewing, at one of Truckee’s newest coffee spots, Dark Horse Coffee Roasters. Situated on the corner of Brockway and Riverside Drive where the old Book & Bean once was, Dark Horse has a 3-kilo Diedrich coffee roaster in the entranceway. The machine utilizes infrared burners to heat a metal drum, which turns and has ridges on the inside to keep the beans stirring, and can roast up to 5 pounds at once. Owner and roaster Drew Taylor applies what he knows about each bean’s ideal roast times and temperatures at sea level, and he experiments extensively with his roasting at Truckee’s altitude.

“With this elevation, it’s a shorter roast time and the temperature level is lower…I’m roasting at between 404 and 418 degrees,” Taylor said, explaining that the moisture content of each bean largely determines roasting details. “But I do it trial and error; it’s something I’m still learning, especially up here.”

The shop, which opened in mid-August, was brought to town by Taylor and his wife Cassidy after they had their first child and moved to Truckee from San Diego to be closer to Cassidy’s parents, who live in Carson City. The pair worked at the original, and only other, Dark Horse shop in San Diego. When they decided to relocate, Taylor asked the SoCal Dark Horse owner, Daniel Charlson, what he thought about a new Dark Horse in the mountains. Charlson supported the idea and after a delayed opening — Taylor had to reinstall the air ducting for the roaster when it didn’t pass town codes — Dark Horse now roasts and brews coffee every day.